Steve is a collaborative project between several major art museums to allow visitors to socially tag and search artwork in museum collections. By allowing social tagging, the project aims to address the "semantic gap" where traditional search methods fail to capture how people search based on subjects, emotions, and ideas. It is a virtual collaboration where participants can tag works and communicate using free online tools. From 2006-2008, the project's research agenda examined questions about who tags, what terms are used, and how tagging impacts search and understanding of collections. Going forward from 2008-2011, the plan is to put social tagging into practice at participating museums and continue collaborating with other institutions.

1. Introducing Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project Susan Chun Cultural Heritage Consultant and Founder, Steve.Museum

2. Why?

4. Searching doesn’t work: the “semantic gap” exists because real people search for subjects, emotions, styles, ideas

6. Photo: Matthew Weinstein for The New York Times

8. Who?

10. And of course: Cyber-volunteers from around the world, thousands (even millions) of them, tagging thousands (even millions) of works

11. Where?

12. steve is a “virtual” organization We meet each other, and our taggers, in cyberspace. We use free online tools to communicate with each other, and to publish our status and results. Our software is open source, and freely downloadable.

14. How?

18. What?

19. 2006-08 Research Agenda

20. Questions about taggers: Will people tag? Who tags? Questions about terms: What kinds of terms are submitted? Questions about novelty: Are the tags new, or did they already exist in museum documentation? Questions about works: are some works harder to tag than others? How good are the tags? Do the tags help searchers? Questions about attitudes: can our professional colleagues accept user-contributed content? Can tags help museum professionals better understand their audiences? Questions about experience: is tagging enjoyable and engaging?

21. 2008-11 Project Plan: “Steve in Action”